Excerpt from the book First Humans, by Thomas Neal Orland.

Copyright 2017. Posted with permission from the publisher.

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The Desire to Know

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  As a father put his young daughter to bed one evening, the little girl, only five years old, looked up to him and asked, “Daddy, who was the first person?”

  The question caught the father by surprise. His thoughts drifted back to his own childhood, of being taught the story of Adam and Eve by his grandmother. Even as a child he had trouble believing that story. He never had a chance to be openly curious about the first people because he had also been taught not to question the authority of his elders, especially Grandma. But now, as an adult, he had no desire to stifle his own daughter’s curiosity. She was genuinely interested, and this made her father proud. The little girl deserved a truthful answer, so he gave her one.

  “Sweetie, there wasn’t a first person. People gradually evolved from apes. You see, millions of years ago people were just like the chimpanzees living in the jungles. Then we started to figure things out by asking questions, just like you do. Over time we became smart enough to invent things, and then we used those inventions to invent more things, and the rest is history.”

  His answer didn’t satisfy her. “But somebody had to be first. Who was it?” She asked.

  “Well, I guess that depends on how you define what a person is. What makes us different from the rest of the animals? Is it making tools? Using language? Knowing how to make fire? Wearing clothes? All these things happened at very different times. Writing hadn’t been invented yet, so we don’t have any records of those days. We do have a lot of clues though. From those clues we’ve gotten a pretty good idea what happened, but it’s not exact.”

  “Tell me what happened. Where did the first person come from?” She persisted.

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  “Well, evolution works kind of like the rainbow. There’s no hard lines between the colors of a rainbow, just a gradual change from one color to another until it’s a completely different color. Over millions of years, a group of animals can change little by little until they become a different species from how they started. Humans and Chimps used to be the same species, but we split up and changed.”

  “Tell me about that one. The one that changed.” She asked again.

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  Children love to ask questions, including a handful of eternally persistent questions we can’t answer with any real satisfaction, such as “What’s outside the Universe?” “What happens to us when we die?” and “Who was the first person?” among others. All religious traditions try to answer these questions in one way or another.  

  Our ancestors had to face these same questions from their children. Lacking the wealth of scientific discoveries we are privileged to have today, each culture developed its own stories of mysterious events and magical beings who created the men, women, flora and fauna of the Earth and the Universe itself, each story being told in its own fanciful way.  

  When the old stories were first told, they were surely the most reasonable answers anyone could imagine for their time. In those days, life was equated with movement. Trees grow, animals and people are born in motion, even unhatched eggs will rock and jiggle in the nest as the chicks inside move. Everything that is alive moves, even if sleeping. Whereas death brings a profound stillness to a being. The ancient people divided everything in the world into two categories, “the quick and the dead” as the Christian Bible puts it. And so, ancient people reasoned that the wind, the rivers, the Sun and Moon and the five planets which move about in the sky are all somehow alive, with individual wants and needs, intentions and emotions.
Since death follows life and never the reverse, everything that is dead must have been alive at one time, including the rocks and Earth itself. But the Earth also rumbles. Perhaps it is only sleeping… And so the stories began. These were among the first real attempts at scientific inquiry.

  As they reasoned about the world and learned about Life, their stories evolved. The gods of nature, of wind and river and of the Sun moving across the sky gave way to newer gods of creation and mysterious unseeable realms as people tried to understand the origins of thoughts and ideas, of consciousness and even Life itself.

  Thousands of these kinds of stories have been told throughout recorded history. Evidence of them goes deep into pre-history. Every culture has them, and thanks to those ancient stories, simply because they exist, we know the desire for knowledge to explain the world and our existence within it is as old as Humanity itself. That desire to know has driven our species to accumulate a fascinating and still growing body of knowledge about the Universe around us, including our own distant and clouded origins.

  So how should we answer a child’s still unanswerable questions today?

  Many people continue to use a few of those ancient stories as if they are unquestionably true, but one day our kids will grow up and discover the facts, the real truths about biology and evolution and sociology and psychology and cosmology and astronomy and then, they’ll come to realize they’ve been misled. To avoid this fate, some parents enforce a culture of blind obedience to their children. They promote mistrust of the sciences and a disdain for higher education. Their children are intellectually confined, restricted from exploring and experiencing the wealth of human knowledge in favor of a handful of ancient mythical stories.

  Other people try to impart a metaphorical interpretation to the old stories. But the mis-match of cultures, language and archaic morality make this a flawed exercise, tedious for both the teacher and the student.

  Instead, the ancient stories should be used as nothing more than what they are; artifacts of a bygone era, echoes of an ancient society that exists no more. Important artifacts, to be sure. Their influence on human history is undeniable. Those stories helped to shape the world we have today, the good and the bad. But a continued adherence to them threatens us with stagnation. We cannot stop our development and declare “good enough”. Without forward progress we will only regress, or watch in despair as other cultures advance beyond us. Progress requires change.

  We still have far, far to go. The mysteries of Life are real, the unknown answers to those persistent questions still perplex us. But the answers lie not in the past, not in blind obedience to old ideas, and not in stagnation. The answers will be found in new discoveries, new developments and deeper understanding through exploration of facts and honest education.

  If there is a God with a message for Humanity, that message would not be the privileged doctrine of only one of the world’s disparate ancient religions. Instead, it would be embedded within all of us, in-born to every child of every era and every culture. Whether it came from a God or not, there is such a message. The message is real, it is clear and it is simply this: Wonder. Ask questions. Explore and learn, for that is where Truth is discovered. And when new truths are found, share them. Add them to the common knowledge of all Humanity. This is the exact process used by all of our predecessors to create the modern world we live in. And the process continues still.
 
  Before the advent of writing, all the ancient stories were oral traditions used to transmit the cultural identity and history of a people from one generation to the next, at least, as best they could remember it. As word-of-mouth transmissions tend to do, the stories drifted in detail and substance. They were often updated and adapted for different times and attitudes, embellished with metaphor and drama, refined, edited and sometimes replaced altogether. The ambiguous and shifting genealogies, personalities and hierarchies of the ancient Greek, Egyptian, Hindu and Mesopotamian pantheons of gods demonstrate how malleable these stories were. Even the Christian bible contains such inconsistencies, such as the two accounts of creation, multiple references to other gods instead of a one-God Universe, and the different genealogies of Jesus, among many, many others.

  The earliest Christians updated and replaced Jewish and Greek traditions with new stories. The first Muslims adopted a replacement for the ancient Arab traditions. The pre-rabbinical, tribal Jews updated and unified the old Mesopotamian deities, which in turn were variations of ancient Egyptian beliefs, which themselves seem to have even more ancient connections to much older religions, as do the Hindu and Yoruba traditions, etc.

  Today, the time has come again for a new era. The biblical stories of creation have had an unusually long run in the history of Humanity, but we have learned much since they were written. The old tales of creation and salvation, superstitions and damnation have lost credibility in the light of our modern scientifically enlightened culture. It is time for new stories.

  Why were the Christian stories so resilient? Because of a miracle. It’s as simple as that. Sometime in the middle of the eighth millennium of civilization, (thirty-five hundred years before present) a miracle occurred. Humanity found a way to transcend time and space. We created writing.

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  Until that time, information was fragile and transient. A message was only as good as the memory of whoever held it. With the invention of writing, information became robust and durable. It became possible for messages to travel over great distances and forward through time unaltered. The words of people long dead could speak to persons born many generations later, living in lands far removed from the author. No matter how many intermediate messengers handled it, no matter how long it took to get somewhere, the writer’s exact message persisted, not just someone’s best recollection of it. No longer did legacies and histories have to be trusted to the memories of sons and daughters. No longer did the story die with the storyteller. No longer did the message drift in substance or meaning from one person to the next. This was a miraculous thing to the ancients. It was powerful, and it is why the earliest stories to be written down became sacrosanct.

  The Christian New Testament says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John, 1:1)  Such was the power of written words that they were equated with the creation and the creator of the Universe itself. Indeed, stories are just that. Every reader interprets and imagines the same story from his own perspective. If the story is moving, it will change the reader; perhaps only a little, perhaps profoundly. Then that person carries his or her new perspective into everything they do, and their world is changed, and they in turn change the world.

  A good story is simultaneously its own world and a creator of the world we live in. The ancients recognized this. This was the miracle of the written word. The simple act of having been written down was enough to give those first recorded stories the utmost importance. They had real power, a genuine authority and a position of veneration unlike anything else. They were elevated to the position of sacred words never to be doubted nor questioned. What started out as a set of simple stories used to transmit cultural identity and social norms from one generation to the next became crystalized into a reference guide for all of existence, then used as such for the next two millennia, spanning more than a hundred generations.

  Those stories are long overdue for an update.

  Today, writing is no longer a mysterious, miraculous thing relegated to specialist scribes. Reading and writing are common everyday tools anyone can use.

  Over the millennia, our accumulated knowledge and wisdom have increased our understanding of the Universe and the world we live in. Real truth, we’ve discovered, is immutable, universal and can survive the scrutiny of skeptics, unlike the ancient stories of creation. And yet, far too many of us still adhere to the literal words and archaic culture of the ancient books, including their stagnant stories of purpose, meaning and morality.

  The mythos that guided our forebears into and through adulthood are no longer relevant to how we live today. Our culture is no longer universally agrarian, no longer ruled by superstition and no longer limited by a crippling poverty of information. Today, for the first time in history, most people live in big cities. Most people have a formal education. The world’s knowledge is at our fingertips. We are not just different from our great-grandparents, we are profoundly different. This is a great thing.

  Children should be different from their parents. They must have the opportunity to become something greater. This is the seat of progress in the world. This is what lifted us out of the primitive animal-like existence of our distant prehistoric ancestors and made our modern world what it is, one generation at a time. All our children deserve truthful, modern answers to their questions so that they may build upon them and become greater than us. And we of the older generations must accept this.

  This is an important difference between the purpose of this series of stories and those of the ancient religions. Our stories are never meant to be taken as hard, literal truth. Our stories are nothing more than illustrative, intended to be updated, revised and improved as we learn new facts.  

  The exact details of our stories may not be perfectly accurate, but that’s not the point. This is not an academic study. These narratives are ‘factions’—small, concise subsets of more scholarly work, a fact-based fiction of what happened all those eons ago, stories to make our history meaningful, understandable and relevant to inquisitive young minds.

  Each story is also an opportunity to inject a subtle lesson. They should do more than just answer a question. They should also inspire. Stories should give a child role models so she or he is better equipped to face adversity and meet life with purpose. These fictional role models illustrate the process of discovery, innovation, when and how to rebel against tyranny, when to respect tradition and when to break it, how to be a valued member of a community and why. These are things the old stories were also crafted to do, but in a distant culture driven by superstition and throttled by ignorance. They worked in their time, but the same stories will not work so well in our modern technological and sociologically enlightened culture, driven by innovation, and throttled only by concerns over unforeseen consequences and the spirit of fair play for all.

  And they must be stories, not just facts. When answering the question “where did people come from?” if we simply tell our kids that humans evolved from apes, the next question is invariably “how?” and “when did we change?” and “who was the first one?”  It is difficult to imagine an animal making fire for the first time, or knapping a flint spear point, or choosing to stand up and walk on two feet for no apparent reason.
Unfortunately, we don’t know the exact details for most of the critical events in our evolutionary past and we probably never will. We are forced to either give an unsatisfying shrug of the shoulders or resort to telling fictional legends, like the ancient storytellers before us.

  But stories are powerful. Like a good metaphor, a simple narrative can encapsulate a complex idea in a way that makes it easy to understand. We should tell our kids stories.

  This may seem counter to what was previously said about being truthful, but unlike the writers in biblical eras, we have the advantage of many centuries’ worth of scientific discovery, logic and reasoning to help guide us closer to truth in our legends than any of the ancient stories ever did, or ever could. When children seek answers to important questions, we can give them answers that illustrate our best understanding of what may have happened. But the truth is often more complex than young minds are ready to grasp, and so we must also simplify and fictionalize our stories to make them more digestible and appropriate, just as our ancient counterparts did with their children, to the best of their abilities.

  Today, we know far more about our ancient beginnings than ever before, and we still have much left to learn. The specific details of how, why, where and when particular events took place are largely unknown, but these are the very ones our children are curious about. We have much work to do before we can give absolutely true and accurate answers. Until that time, these new stories may satisfy, or better yet, pique a child’s curiosity. They are as accurate as we can make them, using scientifically plausible events and timelines. These stories are intended to be accessible to young minds, perhaps with a little adult interpretation.

  These are stories of the first humans.

  These are the stories of how we became human